The Rose

Casida of the Rose

The rose

was not searching for the sunrise:

almost eternal on its branch,

it was searching for something else.

The rose

was not searching for darkness or science:

borderline of flesh and dream,

it was searching for something else.

The rose

was not searching for the rose.

Motionless in the sky

it was searching for something else.

-Federico Garcia Lorca

translated by Robert Bly

Week eight: Holy Week I

Week 8, Holy Week I: Citing this week’s readings, what recommendations would you give churches today observing Holy Week, through Holy Saturday?

Jesus is completely abandoned in the hours leading up to his death. As Raymond Brown points out, while the first disciples left everything in order to follow Jesus, his last disciples left everything in order to get away from him.[1] Standing in church on an April afternoon today, it might be easy to think, “Well, if I had been there, I would have stood up for him. Or, we, as a congregation, would have stood up for him.” But in the previous chapter, Brown has suggested including Christians among the cast of characters opposing Jesus in the Passion play. He explains:

"Gospel readers are often sincerely religious people who have a deep attachment to their tradition. Jesus was a challenge to religious traditionalists since he pointed to a human element in their holy traditions—an element too often identified with God’s will. If Jesus was treated harshly by the literal-minded religious people of his time who were Jews, it is quite likely that he would be treated harshly by similar religious people of our time, including Christians. Not Jewish background but religious mentality is the basic component in the reaction to Jesus."[2]

In reflecting on the season of Lent for week five, I suggested that Lent be a time for us to slow down, to notice God’s absence, and to observe where we have turned away from God in our lives. Perhaps Holy Week is a time for us to ask, “Where is belief getting in the way of my relationship with God?” “Are their aspects of my worship that have become stale (“chametz”[3]) and that separate me from others and/or from God?” “What beliefs or practices do I need to let go of in order to deepen my relationship with God, with others, and with myself?”

In his description of the Jewish Passover, Greenberg writes, “True freedom means accepting the ethics of responsibility,” Several pages later, he adds “…sharing or reaching beyond the self is a fundamental mark of free people.[4] After the performance of a Passion play in which Christians also played the role of Jesus’ oppressor, it would be helpful to think creatively about the role of oppression in our current lives. In a group setting, it would be helpful to discuss the dual identity of oppressor and oppressed and to then explore how these identities take shape in our personal and communal lives.[5]

Though space is limited, I want to make two final points. The first point is that the practices suggested above are meant to help us to understand that like the Exodus, the crucifixion did not destroy evil in the world. “What it did was set up an alternative conception of life.” Greenberg writes of the Exodus. “…it points the way to the end goal toward which all life and history must go.”[6] I believe this holds true of the crucifixion and resurrection as well.

Secondly, I believe that to fully understand the Christian version of this alternative, we must remember that all life turned from God in the final hours of Jesus’ life. “Nature itself is plunged into a darkness that covers the whole land … from the sixth to ninth hour,” Brown reminds us.[7] Even Jesus turns away, asking “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The entire world has rejected Jesus. Now he must let go of his God and face death. According to Father Bede Griffiths, it is in this surrender to nothingness, to darkness, that Jesus is taken to the total Love. “Behind death is this tremendous power of Love,” says Father Bede.[8] Ideally, the rituals and practices of Holy Week will help each one of us to experience the pain of being mocked and rejected, of being isolated and cut off from everything we know and love. And it will then allow us to gradually awaken and to be released back into the world, connected once again in God.

[1] Brown 156
[2] Brown 149
[3] Greenberg 41-46
[4] Greenberg 49-51
[5] The work of Paulo Freire would be useful in leading this discussion!
[6] Greenberg 36
[7] Brown 162
[8] http://thechristianliturgicalyear.blogspot.com/2009/03/father-bede-griffiths-surrendering-to.html

Father Bede Griffiths, Surrendering to the Feminine

If the video isn't working (I'm still figuring out this process of embedding videos) you can watch it here.

“...What my experience taught me was that when everything thing else goes, you discover this love, which is in you all the time, it’s there deep down and you know nothing about it. But let everything go and it comes. And I got a tremendous insight into Jesus on the Cross from this. It was very interesting. And at the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” you see, that was a climax for him. And I think at that moment he had lost everything. His disciples had fled, the jurors were all against him, the people rejected him, and now he had to let go of his God. Do you see? “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” And the moment he let go of God and faced death, darkness, nothingness, he was taken to total Love you see. That is the experience of death. Behind all death is this tremendous power of Love. ..."
Father Bede Griffiths

Sitting with desire

A note on the sweet tooth

(butternut squash)

(licorice assortments)

Hello sugar crash--

I know I'm supposed to be sitting with my desires. But I guess that's why they call for "practice, practice, and never-ending practice." Cause tonight I went just a little overboard... And I'm regretting it.

Imagine the Joy in one delicious spoonful of my creamy butternut squash. Imagine how long that warmth, that sweetness would last me.

But a bowl full, then a handful of licorice, and then, I admit, some of Bill's leftover cocoa b-day cake with chocolate morsels and strawberries on top.

After all of that, I'm feeling empty again, my gears screeched to a halt, and overflowing.

But--

With just this breath I begin again (over and over and over again).

Opening my lips to this glass of water, or to this cup of hot tea, like baptismal waters, their cleansing waters flow. And I know now --not Joy, not yet-- but emptiness. I know emptiness and I know hunger, sitting here, my desires washing (wave upon wave upon wave) through me.

Between Going and Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now at bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shae of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
Octavio Paz

Throwing Flowers Against Evil

In an interview with Derrick Jenson (Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, 1995) Terry Tempest Williams describes how for several weeks during Easter season, Yaqui people reenact the passion play by throwing flowers against evil. Her description of the Easter ceremony is worth quoting in full:

"Imagine this: a slow, inexorable build-up of evil against the forces of good. The fariseos, of pharisees, are dressed in black cloaks. They are masked and they march to a slow, steady dirge, to the haunting flute music that is accompanying them. They are carrying the weight of evil that is leaning against the village. In their long black capes they forcefully make their way through the crowd of onlookers. Their goal is to literally penetrate the church. They have stolen the body of Christ, they have violated every sense of decency within the community, they have marred and destroyed the sacred.

The fariseos charge the church in full run. As they do this, they are showered with flower petals thrown against evil by the children, by the women on both sides of the human gauntlet. The young girls--five, six, seven years old--are adorned in crisp white dresses. They are the final barrier to the community's holy altar that the fariseos must penetrate. The fariseos charge again. The girls raise boughs of cottonwood and mesquite and wave them over the fariseos. The fariseos are repelled.
They retreat, take off their black capes and return to the santuario in confession. A deer- the Deer Dancer--the most peaceful of animals, covered with flower petals, dances in the middle of the fariseos. The fariseos have been 'changed to good' and are 'forgiven.' The universe is restored, health and peace have been returned to the village."

After reading TTW's description of the Yaqui Easter Ceremony, I plucked the petals off of my Valentine's Day bouquet and stored them in the fridge, waiting for the perfect occassion to perform my own tiny version of "throwing flowers against evil." I decided to wait for a Sunday because, as I understand it, Sundays in Lent stand outside of Lent (as a time of exile) as days of epiphany, celebrating the manifestation of God in our lives...

So, yesterday, the second Sunday of Lent, I tossed my Valentine's Day flowers onto a pile of waste stacked outside of my husband's place of work (a barrel of compressor oil, and fan motor for an old heating and air conditioning system). Obviously, my gesture here is symbolic, but I think the symbols we carry with us from generation to generation and the stories we tell have power to change, and to heal.

before

and after

A gentle wind picked up after I distrubuted the flowers, circling them round the old engine in dance, as if to consecrate my simple gesture...

On the way back to our apartment, my husband and I passed a truck, its bed filled with flowers, mourning, honouring and remembering a marine lost to the war in Iraq. Attached to the truck was a trailer filled with crosses, flowers, photographs, names of soldiers, and the American flag. The words "faith" and "hope" framed the bumper:

Week Six: Jewish and Christian Time

Two Page Essay: Compare and assess these accounts of ‘time’ in Christianity and Judaism.

In reading Raddi Greenberg’s account of the Jewish holidays, I am reminded of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, writer, and professor and Bernie Glassman, a Jewish Zen Master from New York. A deep understanding of the “threefold present,” as identified in class, is reflected in the life and work of both Wiesel and Glassman, men deeply rooted in Jewish culture and tradition. It has been years since I read Man’s Search for Meaning but I remember that essential to Weisel’s survival was his ability to remember life before the concentration camps, to imagine his wife greeting him at the door, for example, and to bring these memories into the present, holding them safely in his thoughts of the future.

I am then reminded of Bernie Glassman’s retreats at Auschwitz, retreats including survivors, children of survivors, children of Nazis, children of German soldiers, and children of refugees. Though the Holocaust, as an event, is of the past, the pain and suffering of the Holocaust is very much present today. Through entering into relationship with this suffering, i.e. acknowledging it and giving it space, these retreats transform and heal this suffering in time. In shifting the very meaning of this suffering now, this healing penetrates all time: past, present and future.

In his chapter “The Holidays as the Jewish Way,” Rabbi Greenberg explains that the rhythm of the Jewish year leads the Jewish people through a reenactment of the Exodus with Passover, the covenant acceptance with Shavuot and a reconstruction of the exodus way with Sukkot.[1] Like the Christian (in the fullest sense of the word) experience of time, while these holidays commemorate the historical past, more importantly, they bring this historical past into the present and summon the future into the present reality.[2] Greenberg writes, “Uniquely, the human being can anticipate the future redemption and bring it closer. Thus, an event that has not yet occurred can have a profound impact on the present, an impact strong enough to overcome even powerful past conditioning”[3] and, I would add, terrifying and violent conditions in our current lives (as we see in the writings and teachings of Elie Wiesel). The Jewish year and its holidays are designed to teach us how to deal with sorrow, to remind us of suffering and death when we become too comfortable in our daily routines, and to nurture us with visions of a perfect world[4] and belief in a final, universal redemption.[5]

While there are many parallels between Christian and Jewish understanding and use of time, with the 8th day (with Christ rising the first day after the Sabbath) a new time evolves; with the resurrection of Christ, time itself is transformed.[6] According to Schmemann, the Church continued to use the Jewish festivals of Passover and Pentecost because these holidays anticipated the experience of time of which the Church was now the manifestation and fulfillment.[7] These holidays represented a period of passage into joy and salvation, into a new ‘eon’ of the Spirit[8] (as they represented passage from exile to freedom in the Old Testament). Therefore, the early celebration of Easter is the fulfillment of time itself. Namely, through Easter, meaning (Joy) is given to time, thus transforming the reality of Christian life in this world (for Christians are no longer waiting for the savior; He has come).

[1] Greenberg 25
[2] Ibid. 27
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. 33
[5] Ibid. 19
[6] Schmemann 51
[7] Ibid. 56
[8] Ibid. 56-57

Fasting

I'm thinking of fasting today, of sitting with my desire, of giving it space to move through me, to wash me out and to undo me.

I'm thinking of what it means to live and love with a broken heart, raw, wide open, and exposed. I'm thinking about what it might mean to be, as I am, in the world, unattached to the labels I have been given, to the deep shame of being told how I've been broken.

into fragments.

that can't be pieced back together again.

I'm wondering what it would mean to unravel these broken pieces while standing strong, breath steady and deep.

Fasting: the practice of peeling back those layers built to divide and to hold apart, to protect us from being human.

I pray to be broken open.
...Over and over and over again.

Ah Holy Jesus

Played at the Ash Wednesday service I attended, just piano... hauntingly beautiful. Here's a version on YouTube I enjoy:

Ah, Holy Jesus